Traffic resumed on several highways in France on Friday after two weeks of blockages by thousands of farmers and major government concessions, particularly on pesticides.
The strategic highway in the south of France, the A7, which was cut for 130 km since January 23, has reopened.
The convoy which had set off from Agen (Lot-et-Garonne) towards the Paris region turned back.
And no more blockages have been recorded in Île-de-France, confirmed a police source.
“A few rare localized points” want to “maintain until Saturday” and “isolated groups” “hold out until the Agricultural Show (February 24-March 3),” summarized a police source.
Friday at 3 p.m., nine motorways managed by Vinci, France's main concessionaire, remained cut and around forty interchanges closed, three times fewer than at the peak of the movement.
Farmers have left “hundreds of tonnes of waste” behind them, a spokesperson said, which is slowing down reopening because it needs to be cleaned and rehabilitated.
The threat of unions
On Thursday, the majority union alliance FNSEA-Jeunes Agriculteurs (JA) called “to suspend the blockades and enter into a new form of mobilization”.
The FNSEA wants to see the implementation of the first measures by the Agricultural Show and a law by June, indicated its president, Arnaud Rousseau, on RMC-BFMTV on Friday.
“If in the end we were not considered, or if all this was just a flash in the pan, we will do it again.
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The Rural Coordination, the 2nd representative union, for its part “invited” its members to “suspend” the actions.
“The farming world will remain mobilized in the run-up to the Agricultural Show and with the greatest vigilance regarding the progress expected at the national and European level,” the organization said in a press release.
The third union, the Confédération paysanne, remains mobilized because “the fundamental question of income” is “still not tackled head-on by the government”.
As for organic farmers, they "feel like they are the ones left out of the negotiations", deplores their federation, the FNAB, which estimates the sector's losses at 550 million euros over two years and for whom "the suspension of Ecophyto is just another drop of water in the disillusionment.”
The decline on pesticides
On Thursday, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, for his third round of announcements in a week, listed measures which according to him meet “a large part of the expectations” of farmers.
A major change intended to obtain the lifting of the blockade, he announced the “shutdown” of the Ecophyto plan aimed at reducing the use of pesticides.
“France has chosen to act against reason, against history, against the ecological emergency,” said the NGO Agir pour l’environnement in a press release on Friday.
“We must move away from punitive ecology to be in an ecology of solutions,” government spokesperson Prisca Thevenot argued on Friday, assuring that the executive “continues to have ambitions for ecology, but this ecology must to be in the concrete of realities.”
Also read: Between farmers and ecology, why things get so stuck
Around Lyon (Rhône), the dams have mostly dispersed.
A notable exception is the A43, still blocked by the Confédération paysanne about thirty km east towards Chambéry.
Some demonstrations are also still obstructing traffic on certain portions of the A9, the A10, the A20 and the A54, around Clermont-Ferrand and further north on the A71, or even south of Dijon on the A31.
Dispersed actions
In Hauts-de-France, all the roadblocks have been lifted and no action called by the regional section of the FNSEA is planned in the coming days, its president, Simon Ammeux, told AFP.
“The ultimatum is given at the (Agricultural) Show,” he warns.
The tractors which blocked the A1 near Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport “are on their way back”, according to him.
Here and there, new actions are organized.
A filter barrier was thus set up on Friday morning at a toll near Saint-Quentin (Aisne), on the A26, indicates Bruno Cardot, of the General Confederation of Beet Planters (CGB), a specialized association of the FNSEA.
The action was maintained “because the base requested it, a sort of last stand, a decompression chamber after ten very intense days”, explains the planter.
In Occitania, once the epicenter of the protest movement but losing momentum since the arrival of Gabriel Attal a week ago, the new series of announcements has led to the lifting – immediate or soon – of several roadblocks, notably in the Aveyron and Gers.